I'm using version 14.03.
Anytime I open UFT, Cortana, or even Windows Shell Experience Host if I remove Cortana, starts being very slow and CPU hungry. It stays that way until I log off or reboot. Cortana is the process that handles the start menu and searches so it's very noticeable when it is slower.
the installation guide mentions that Cortana should be disabled during UFT install, which I tried. It seemed to have fixed the issue at first, Cortana stayed responsive for a while after I opened UFT but it ended up going back to being slow later on. Now, after a reboot, it reverted back to the old behaviour of being slow as soon as UFT is launched
Another thing worth noting is that as soon as I uninstall UFT, Cortana works well again (no reboot).
What could be causing this?
I'd suggest moving this subject to https://superuser.com/ community.
It indeed sounds like a real conflict between Unified Functional Testing and Cortana. not sure that you, as an end-user, can solve it.
First, I'd suggest the obvious - contact support of both companies, and update to the latest versions.
Second, try to collect as much information as you can:
Process Monitor - filter by the relevant processes (Cortana process name is SearchUI.exe, but I don't know about UTF).
Microsoft Event Viewer - try to seek for events in the exact time of the issue.
Related
I'm new to Mac. So far when restarting everything worked reliably as it did before and was more or less in the same state.
Can I as a dev lean on not losing any state information when restarting? Can every application be restored completely and when does data loss occur? Are there any known bugs? Can I leave my debugger at a point in my application, restart/sleep and expect to be in the same state with my debugger?
Before getting too comfortable with the feature I want to know how much I can rely on it to restore everything to the previous state, otherwise I will be more cautious with restarts, so I think this info is helpful for any dev using Mac OS X as a platfom to develop.
Applications to not get restore state functionality magically but they support APIs that help doing it. Some applications do it well, others less well and others not at all.
In practice, for the applications that support it, it works quite reliably, provided the logout went cleanly and you've not out of diskspace or something similar fatal.
I am experiencing the exact same issue as this fellow, and cant seem to find any real solutions to the issue. The only solution I've been able to find so far that works it not maximizing VS. Keeping VS in windowed mode fixes the problem completely, but as soon as it returns to maximized state UI elements no longer redraw unless the stale area is put under new active focus. This makes it impossible to develop and I'm forced to return to windowed mode. I've tried disabling hardware acceleration with no luck. Any Ideas?
There are a handful of feedback reports at connect.microsoft.com that describe a similar problem. But none that ever evolved to a solution, most typically the programmer that filed the report stopped responding when asked to provide additional diagnostics.
Clearly this is an environmental problem, something is wrong with your machine. VS2012 uses WPF for rendering, it puts non-trivial demands on the machine. You do need a solid video driver and a functional DirectX stack to make it work without problems. This tends to be an issue in general, video drivers are by far the most problematic kind of driver. Problems are roughly correlated with the age of the machine and how old the operating system is.
So a good starting point is to look for a video driver update first, visit the web site of the company that made your adapter to look for the latest. Reinstall DirectX on the machine next. If you were considering a clean update of your machine before, like updating the Windows version, now would be a good time to start with a clean slate.
We're starting a new custom project right now from a client and one of the requirements is the process cannot be terminated unless the system is shutting down, restarting, or logging-off.
This application monitors the USB interface. We will be using WMI to query the device periodically.
The client want's to run the application on Windows XP Operating System and doesn't like installing .NET. So we targeted Visual Basic 6 as our language.
My main concern is this application cannot be terminated. Our Project Adviser talks about Anti-virus and yes, some of the anti virus cannot be terminated. I was thinking how to do the same in Visual Basic 6. I know there will be API involved on the project but where should I go? so API is ok with me.
I saw some articles that converts the EXE to a SERVICE, create Windows Service in Visual Basic 6, etc.
So please .. share your thoughts.
If you want to be evil, you can call the (officially) undocumented RtlSetProcessIsCritical NTDLL function. This will immediately BSOD the machine if your process is terminated.
You cannot create a process that cannot be terminated without some sort of kernel-mode hooking, which involves writing a driver. You might want to look into Rootkits: subverting the Windows kernel if you're interested in that. However, even with kernel-mode hooking there are still numerous ways to terminate processes. The alternative is to use user-mode hooking, easily bypassed but enough for very simple projects.
The solution you want to use will depend on how far you want to go with the termination protection. And even if you do succeed in preventing process termination, there may be ways of preventing your application from working properly - e.g. killing the WMI service.
I think you want to look at writing an NT Service.
More info here: http://www.montgomerysoftware.com/CreatinganNTServiceinVisualBasic6/tabid/161/language/en-US/Default.aspxlink text
It's really frustrating coding in VB6 right now specially I dumped my head in C# for 2 years though I coded in VB6 for 5 years..
Moving back is a pain as if I am starting a new programming language.
To be honest, you are trying to do something in VB6 that it really isn't that great at.
When you say 'cannot be terminated' - what do you mean by that? There are several levels there:
a) App shows a window but the user cannot close it with the X button, or it does not show one
b) App shows no windows or maybe sits in task tray
c) App shows no windows and cannot be shut down from the Applications tab of task manager
d) App cannot be shut down from the process list of task manager
(a) and (b) are probably easiest to do in straight VB. (c) is still possible, but getting uglier. (d) gets you into hack territory and would almost certainly be frownd upon if you did manage it.
If you really need to stop users closing then you can probably hack it to a greater or lesser degree, but the real answer is as the others have said - a system service (this is exactly the srt of thing they were intended for). However that is one thing that VB6 isn't good at so the best solution to your problem is c#.
A co-worker of mine had downloaded a vb example project a while back to see how to make a call or two, he discovered it today again, and noticed that while sitting in the IDE the time/date is updating automatically when the entire project is not even running.
How does this work, we looked around for code but can't find anything giving it away.
Any ideas?
No enough info, really, but is it possible the time and date are part of a user control sited on the main form? In the IDE, user controls operate in a hybrid mode where their code can be running when the app itself is not.
I can't think of any other scenario where if the IDE is truly stopped, any code can be running.
The StatusBar control in Windows Common Controls can automatically display the current date and time. It updates its display even in design mode.
If you have ever developed controls yourself, you might have experienced an AHA! moment when you realised that your control code is running when the control is being used at design time in the IDE.
I'm a (happy?) user of Windows, but recently have problems that I don't know how to track.
I have a WinXP plus home and work Win2k3 systems. Some of them are freezing itermittently for a short amount of time (from less than a second to a few seconds). There is no CPU usage spike and not much HDD activity. Neither Process Explorer nor Windows Task Manager show any suspicious processes. The services also look ok.
On one of computers, dragging and droping (within Explorer windows or windows and apps) freezes the machine for 10-20 sec. After this period I can continue to use drag & drop for some (long) time with no delays. Don't think it is virus – it would probably infect all machines easily.
How can I know what is going on with my systems?
Update: Thank you for your suggestions. I solved the problem on one of the machines – it was a nasty rootkit. I needed to use 3rd party tools to detect and remove it. How can I diagnose it without this tool?
This is most likely not faulty hardware.
On Windows, there are occasional messages that are broadcast system-wide to all top-level windows. If a window does not respond (or is slow in responding), then the whole system will appear to freeze. There is a built-in timeout and if exceeded, the system will assume that the window isn't going to respond and it skips the window (this could be the 10-20 second delay you're seeing although I think the timeout is a little higher than this).
I have not seen a solution for tracking these kinds of problems. You might experiment by creating a program that sends individual messages to each top-level window and record the time taken for each to respond. This isn't failsafe but it's a starting point, and this is (if I recall correctly) the technique I used to identify such a problem with Adobe's iFilter (for the Microsoft indexing service).
But before you go down this path, you said that these are recent problems. See if you can figure out what you might have installed recently and then uninstall it. This includes Windows patches as well as any new drivers or applications.
Are you able to peg it to a rough time-frame of when the symptoms started? If so, you could match the critical updates/installs in Add/Remove programs to that estimation and start looking there.
More generally, I find using MSCONFIG to temporarily turn off all startup programs and all non-Microsoft services can help quickly divide and conquer - If the symptoms disappear, you have a shorter list to work through.
Safe mode (with or without network - see next idea) is another way of narrowing the list of suspects.
Since it is multiple machines, if it were hardware it would have to be something common... Especially if it is two different locations. That said, network connectivity (or lack thereof) is the other frequent culprit. Bringing up a system in a standalone config (net cable unplugged/wireless radio disabled) will seem VERY slow at first, then once the timeouts and various retries have been exceeded, should zip along, especially if you are still running in a limited startup environment. I have had recalcitrant switches/routers be a problem, as well as sluggish external services (like an ISP's DNS) cause symptoms like this.
No floppy, optical, or other removable drive access at those times?
I would recommend a tool that can show files, COM objects and network addresses accessed within the application:
http://www.moduleanalyzer.com/
You can see the dlls that use each resource and the time is taking the accesses.
The problem with Windows slowdown is in general related to a dll that is running in a process/es that is doing some staff inside a process.
In these situations you won't see anything in tools that monitor from a Process perspective. You will need to see what is happening inside the process to see any suspicious dll or module.
This tool use call stack information to see what module is accessing resources.
Try that application that has a full-feature trial.
You probably have a faulty piece of hardware, from my experience likely your HD. If you are connect to a network share (SMB) and having connectivity issues that also could cause hangs. The drag and drop slowness in general points to the "explorer" process hanging, the same process used to communicate with network resources (file shares for example).
To diagnose the activities or infiltration a rootkit or other malware uses, you might check out the forums on Bleeping Computer, some of the volunteers there who help people remove such may be willing to help you figure out where to look for such infestations.
I recently cleaned up some malware through the help of an expert on that site which I also needed to use a third-party tool (in my case Malwarebytes) to remove, but the malware was relatively new such that this tool couldn't fully clean out the stuff until a more recent update to its definitions got released.
I still don't know how or where exactly to look on a given system for such an infestation, but that site might hook you up with someone who has that expertise. As long as you emphasize that you're looking for this to be able to track down such and not for purposes of writing your own malware I would hope they'd be receptive to your request.